Trolling on LinkedIN

More than ten years have passed since I last held a job with a salary, and my ability to survive, and even thrive, without a job is seen as a bit of a mystery to many of my friends and relatives. The fact that I'm as well off as my well paid younger brother must be a complete mystery to him, and I couldn't help sense a certain degree of resentment from him last time we met. But there isn't really any mystery to my situation if one simply sits down to analyse it.

The key difference between my financial situation and the financial situation of most other people is that I've managed to reduce fees and taxes to near zero by simply avoiding investments that come with such burdens. My brothers have all invested in real-estate which comes with many taxes and many fees. I have instead put my money into gold for the moment, which comes with no taxes and no fees.

My brothers are spending a large part of their capital income on fees and taxes, but I don't. I spend it on myself, and since I've moved to Portugal where the cost of living is lower than in Norway, I can afford to let my children in Norway take half of the capital income without it impacting my standard of living.

This is only possible because I like to live a life in ease rather than luxury. I have no desire to travel the world. Whenever I see pictures of friends on the slopes of the Alps or in front of some city landmark, I thank myself lucky for being at home with my little projects. This doesn't mean that I don't like to go for an outing every now and again. I do like a change of scenery, but it doesn't have to be to some expensive resort, or very far away. Tagging along with my wife to a work related conference somewhere is luxury enough for me, and the fact that she gets paid by her employer to do so makes it all the more enjoyable.

During summers, we rent a house with a swimming pool for a week, and that's about it as far as traveling is concerned. Since I'm living in Portugal rather than Norway, my vacations come at a fraction of the cost it would have been had I stayed in Norway.

All of this has been possible through simple analysis of the reality of my situation. I've been blessed with an inheritance large enough to sustain me and my family, provided I arrange thing optimally in terms of finances. The trick was to figure out what the optimal configuration was, and to actually implement the solution. The implementation required me to sell my house in Norway, which I found emotionally painful at the time, but as the saying goes: there's no gain without some pain.

There's nothing mysterious about my situation, but people are nevertheless puzzled. My mother has been wondering what to tell her friends about me. Her other children have to work in order to cover their daily expenses. Surely, I must be doing something to make a living myself. When I tell her that I don't actually need to work, she refuses to believe me. I guess the consensus among my closest relatives and friends is that I'm living off of my wife, engaged in dodgy tax fraud, or possibly both. The truth is simply too straight forward to believe.

Key to all of this is my personality. I'm an INTJ in the Meyers-Briggs type indicator, and I'm an unusually well balanced one with a flat distribution over the four components of this indicator, so I'm unlikely to ever meet anyone more INTJ than myself.

A key trait of the INTJ is that things are analysed into their essentials, and plans are drawn up based on this. I'm not particularly interested in anecdotal evidence. I want to know the broad lines and the essentials. Who cares if someone did this or that. What matter is the broader picture.

It was this type of thinking that convinced me that I was in fact in a position to retire at the age of 48, and that the only thing holding me back was a lot of anecdotal stories about people getting destroyed by an overly optimistic view of their personal finances. According to my calculations at the time, I would scrape by for a few years and then prosper.

To be on the safe side, my plan was to add some income through private projects. However, this came to nothing, and it worried me that I failed in this because my margins for error were thin. When I sold my house in 2017, I was very much at the edge of what I could endure, so I decided to look for work in Porto, just to be on the safe side.

I brushed up on my LinkedIN profile, and even got a few job interviews, but no-one hired me, and I eventually stopped looking for work. Seeing that my finances were sufficiently improved from selling my house to sustain me as originally planned, my nerves calmed, and I'm now completely relaxed about things because they have in fact unfolded according to my original plan from more than ten years ago. Now that all the uncertainties are gone, I can say for sure that I'll do fine under almost any circumstances from here on out.

But my LinkedIN profile is still up, and I get a handful of views every week. Not knowing very well what to do with it now that I'm no longer serious about looking for a job, I've decided to make it an honest description of myself rather than a sales pitch for a job. I've added the fact that I'm an INTJ, and I've added the sort of things that have transpired from this fact.

My personality has benefited me in that it has saved me from doing any work since I turned 48. It has also benefited me in that I realized early that the virus scare of 2020 to 2022 was a hoax, and I'm unvaccinated as a consequence of this. Those who come across my LinkedIN profile and read my introduction to the end will learn that I'm independently wealthy and unvaccinated because of my INTJ personality.

Now that the dust has settled on the whole vaccination thing, it's becoming increasingly clear that the push to vaccinate was in fact a push for conformity. To be vaccinated is to be an obedient cog in the machinery of the state.

Those who read my LinkedIN profile are probably themselves dependent on a salary, and they are likely to be vaccinated as well. Faced with a candidate who is neither dependent on a salary nor a cog in the machine, they will necessarily reflect on this, and some will realize that I'm the person they would have liked to be themselves.

Me enjoying a cup of coffee

The Fundamental Flaw of the Current System

We're so used to the way society is currently organized that we rarely think of alternatives, and when we do think of alternatives we tend to do so in order to defend the current system. For example, when we criticize dictatorships, we tend to compare them to democracy, and we tend to find democracy the superior system. However, democracy can hardly be described as perfect. Two years of insanity, especially in the democratic West, has made it clear that democracy is flawed.

All sorts of abuses have been made by people in power, ranging from censorship of scientific thought to mandated injections of experimental medicines and concentration camps for the unvaccinated. Defenders of democracy must therefore fall back to the old argument that democracy isn't perfect, but its the best there is, and there's therefore no need for any change. But is this really true? Is there no system better than democracy?

To answer these questions, we first have to identify the weakness in the current system. Why didn't it stop the abusers dead in their tracks? Why was it that Africa, of all places, ended up as a shining example of good governance in the face of hysteria? For two years straight, people in poorly run democracies enjoyed more freedom than people in highly efficient democracies. People in typical African countries weren't fined for going outside, and health workers weren't forced to take an experimental injection in order to stay employed.

Defenders of democracy must therefore concede that inefficiencies in government are sometimes a good thing. They'll have to admit that highly efficient governments are dangerous. The clever ones will then go on to say that dictatorships are dangerous precisely because they are efficient, and that one of democracy's big virtues is inefficiency. They'll stick with the assumption that the only alternative to democracy is dictatorship. The perfect system remains a democracy, and all they'll concede is that democracy mustn't be too efficient. But that's hardly a strong argument in its support. If the system is a good thing, why shouldn't we want it to be efficient?

What's avoided in all ramblings about the virtues of democracy is some fundamental thinking about the nature of government. The argument is always limited to various types of government. Government itself isn't questioned, and herein lies the key to the problem we're not to supposed to think too deeply about. Maybe, government in the form of a state apparatus is the problem, and democracy is preferable to alternatives only because it's the system that makes the state apparatus the least efficient.

Let us therefore define the state apparatus in simple terms, without concern for how this apparatus is managed:

The key feature of the state is that it sets some people above others. Some people can define laws and regulations, and they are allowed to include coercion in their law-making. In short, the state lets some people rule over other people.

To avoid the sort of abuses of power that such a system invites, most states have a constitution that sets limits to what kind of laws can be made. There's also an elaborate system of courts and governing bodies that are supposed to prevent any one group of people to set the agenda unhindered. However, all this layering of power doesn't change the fact that some people are given the power to rule, and others are forced to comply.

Such a system will inevitably draw towards it the worst of mankind. Psychopaths and useless querulants are drawn to power likes flies to a turd, and they will push decent people to the side. They will inevitably find ways around the elaborate system put up to stop them, and they will in the end produce all sorts of arbitrary laws and regulations for no other reason than the kick they get from doing so. The more insane the law and regulation, the greater the kick of getting it implemented.

Psychopaths get a big kick out of seeing people acting against their own self interest simply because they told them to do so, and it's this desire for power that has been on full display over the past few years. We have seen with our own eyes how hollowed out our system is, how totally corrupt it has become, and how dangerous it now is as it pushes its way towards total destruction and war. Only the wilfully ignorant would claim that the state apparatus has our best interest at heart.

Some will say that this can be fixed with democracy. We elect new rulers who will sweep aside the rot and corruption and restore the rule of law. But the state apparatus is so entrenched that this is unlikely to succeed, and even if we get a few years of respite, the psychopaths and querulants will be back.

The only way to fix the rot is to dismantle the system entirely. This can be done from the inside as well as from the outside, but it must ultimately be done by the complete rejection of the state as a legitimate legal entity.

Some may say that we have to stick with a state because there's no alternative. But this is simply not true. Stateless societies have existed throughout history, and the institutions required for its functioning exist inside all democracies. If the state was to disappear tomorrow, these institutions would take over.

We have private security organizations. We have private arbitration and law. We have private health and education. Everything we need for a peaceful society exists in a private form. No coercion is needed.

The state only exists because a lot of people believe it to be more just and efficient than the private alternatives that we would otherwise use. However, the state is revealing itself as a danger, and we are going to suffer immensely if we don't soon get rid of it. Armed with nuclear weapons, the psychopaths in charge are in a position to kill us all, and anyone who doubt that this could actually happen needs only to be reminded of what our rulers subjected us to over the past two years to have their illusion shattered. Dr. Strangelove is in charge.

This may seem overly pessimistic, but there's plenty of things to be optimistic about. The events of the past few years, together with our rulers' obvious desire for conflict and war, isn't going unnoticed. A lot of people are waking up to the fact that something drastic has to be done, and many are correctly identifying the problem at hand. We can no longer allow a system to exist in which some people are set to rule over others. It's simply too dangerous, and there are ready alternatives that we can use. We don't need a violent revolution or uprising.

The current system can be dismantled bit by bit in the way outlined in this previous post. If this happens in parallel with a general move towards private alternatives to what the state provides in terms of law, security and other services, the transition may end up seamless and undramatic.

The social contract

Redshift Quantization

Back in year 2000, Halton Arp held this lecture on his career as an astronomer, and his findings related to the redshift of Quasars. Of the many things he discovered and recorded back in the 1970s, two things stand out. One was the fact that some Quasars are visibly in front of objects that should be closer to us based on redshift calculations. The other thing he noted was that redshifts aren't uniformly distributed. Some redshifts are more common than others. I.e. redshifts are quantized phenomena.

These findings flew in the face of accepted theory at the time, which held that redshift is uniformly distributed and directly linked to speeds. These assumptions formed in turn the basis for the Big Bang theory, as well as many assumptions related to Black Holes. If Halton Arp's observations were to be accepted as facts, all of this would have to be reconsidered.

This was too much for many theorists to accept, so they made Halton Arp a persona non grata. Instead of considering the evidence collected by Mr. Arp, they ignored it. But the cat was out of the bag and evidence in support of Halton Arp's findings are piling up.

I was reminded of this by one of my readers (cilo) who made a comment about this on my previous post. According to him, the James Webb Space Telescope has collected more data in support of Halton Arp's findings. It appears that the phenomenon of redshift quantization is becoming increasingly difficult to deny.

This means that there's something profound about the universe that current theory isn't able to explain. If we stick to the idea that redshift is purely speed related, we get that some speeds are more common than other speeds. In the context of an expanding universe, we get some distances less likely to contain objects than other distances. The universe around us becomes layered, and this is not what current theory stipulates.

Alternatively, we'll have to accept that not all redshifts are speed related, in which case we have to consider alternative hypothesises of which there are two: One is the tired light hypothesis that suggests that light becomes redder over time due to loss of energy. The other hypothesis, suggested by Halton Arp, is that matter grows more massive over time. Halton Arp called this intrinsic redshift because it says something about the age of the objects observed rather than their distance. I.e. redshifts are intrinsic to objects without regards to distances or speeds.

It should be noted that we don't have to choose one redshift or another. They may all exist together in which case we get a complex mix of factors rather than the clean sterility of conventional astrophysics where only a few variables play a role.

Having established that speed related redshifts can only be quantized if speed itself is quantized, or if matter in an expanding universe is distributed in layers around us, we can go on to consider the tired light hypothesis.

For light to tire without scatter, we require some highly fluid low energy substance to fill the universe, and since no such substance is currently considered to exist in conventional theory, tired light has been dismissed as an impossibility. But if we allow for an aether of zero-point particles we get that light may fade in energy without being scattered. We also get that the light will fade in discrete steps due to the particle nature of the aether. However, these steps are likely to be too small to be the cause of redshift quantization.

The tired light hypothesis is also unable to explain Halton Arp's observation that redshift seems to be independent of distance. Only Halton Arp's intrinsic redshift can explain this part of the puzzle. Objects become redder over time due to mass condensing onto them. But why would mass condensation happen in discrete steps sufficiently large to be noticed by astronomers?

I've proposed in my physics that mass condensation is due to a hypothesized ability of protons to absorb photons. If this is a straight forward process, a proton will grow in mass by a photon every now and again. However, this would show up as a fairly uniform process with many tiny steps. It wouldn't be the relatively large steps that have been observed, so it appears that mass condensation must be something more complex. It may be that photons build up on the surface of protons without making them noticeable larger before some threshold is reached where the photons rearrange themselves into the fabric of the protons. But here, I'm only speculating.

There's plenty of room for speculation at this point, and I'm not going to pretend I have an answer to what may be going on. However, one thing is becoming increasingly clear. Redshift isn't as straight forward a subject as many have made it out to be. Observations don't fit theory, and this gap between observations and theory has been around for some fifty years.

Halton Arp

By The original uploader was Reuben at English Wikipedia. - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Sreejithk2000 using CommonsHelper., CC BY 2.5, Link

Boots, Beans and Bullets

Army logistics are sometimes referred to as "boots, beans and bullets". The boots refer to the men and their gear. The beans refer to food, and the bullets refer to ammunition. If there's a failure to supply any of these three the war is lost.

Seen in this context, it's enlightening to hear NATO chairman Jens Stoltenberg talk about the West's failure to deliver sufficient ammunition to the Ukraine-Russian front line. Ukraine is running low on artillery shells, which is concerning because the Russians have managed to turn the war into an artillery war.

The current war is looking more and more like the first world war, with artillery playing the major role. This is a strategic victory for Russia, because they have spent the past decades preparing for just such a war. They have perfected their artillery and they have stockpiled vast amounts of ammunition, so much so that they are spending more ammunition per day than NATO produces in a month.

NATO, on the other hand has been busy producing advanced modern equipment, and has hardly any stockpile of artillery shells. When I was in the Norwegian Navy back in the early 1980s, we made a point of spending all our ammunition at the end of the year so that our stockpiles would be low for next year's budget.

From an industrial perspective, this was ideal in that it allowed the commanders to grow their budgets without simultaneously grow their need for storage capacities. However, we now see that the Russians chose a different strategy that is now paying off. Instead of keeping their ammunition stockpiles low for budgetary reasons, they chose to pile it up in bunkers for later use.

Decades old ammunition is now being spent by the Russians, while NATO is running low. NATO will have to dramatically increase their production capabilities while the Russians can increase their scale of production in a more organic way.

This development reveals the strategic thinking of the Russians. They accurately assessed that NATO had enough artillery shells to last them a year, after which they'll have to ramp up production by orders of magnitude to keep up with demand. All the Russians had to do was to keep the war confined to artillery, and to lock the enemy in perpetual exchange for a year.

This development has no doubt caught the attention of the Chinese. They must see the Russian strategy as a winning one. But their concern may not be artillery. A war with Taiwan would require ships and air support. Artillery will only be deployed after a successful landing. However, some draining tactic may still be the way to go. Swamping the skies with cheap military gear that Americans will have to constantly shoot down would do the trick. When the Americans run out of ammo, the game is up and Taiwan falls.

Mark Esper with Jens Stoltenberg

By U.S. Secretary of Defense - 200212-D-AP390-6107, CC BY 2.0, Link

How the Meganeura and Quetzalcoatlus Indicate that Inertia has Increased over Time

The Meganeura, which existed on Earth some 300 million years ago, was a dragonfly the size of a seagull. Its shape indicates that it was able to hunt for food in much the same way that dragonflies do this today. It must have been able to jump about in the air, turn on a dime and perform loops and similar displays of aeronautics.

Meganeura, lifesize model
(from Land of the dead blog)

The Quetzalcoatlus, which existed on Earth some 60 million years ago, was a flying dinosaur the size of a giraffe. Its shape indicates that it must have been able to hunt for food much the same way that pelicans do so today.

Quetzalcoatlus

(c) M. Witton via G. Trivedi

These are conclusions we can draw from Darwin's law which states that no animal will develop a shape that doesn't fit with its habits. If something looks like a dragonfly, it will act like a dragonfly. If something looks like a pelican, it will act like a pelican.

The first things that strike us when it comes to these animals is the size of them and the fragility of their wings. The Meganeura was able to fly like a dragonfly despite being the size of a seagull. That's remarkable, because a seagull is unable to perform dragonfly aeronautics despite having wings that are substantially stronger than what the Meganeura was equipped with.

As for the Quetzalcoatlus, no animal that size is able to fly, certainly not with bat-like wings. The biggest bat currently in existence weighs less than 1.5 kg, yet the Quetzalcoatlus was able to fly despite being the size of a giraffe.

The mismatch between the size of these animals and their ability to fly indicate that something dramatic must have happened. Gravity must have been lower. However, the mystery doesn't stop at gravity. Inertia must have been different too. This becomes clear once we consider the type of manoeuvring that these animals must have been able to perform.

Getting off the ground is but one problem that they had to overcome. It can be explained by suggesting that gravity was less strong. But once the Meganeura was off the ground its thin wings would nevertheless have been a problem. If it tried to turn on a dime, or suddenly jump one way or the other, its wings would break due to the stress of the change in momentum. The animal must have had a body with less inertia than what an identical body would have today.

The same can be said about the Quetzalcoatlus. If its head had the sort of inertia that such a head would have today, its neck would snap the moment it tried to do a pelican like flip of its beak.

This suggests that matter has become heavier in terms of both gravity and inertia since the time when these animals existed. We can use the Meganeura and Quetzalcoatlus as evidence for an increase in gravity and inertia, and a ready explanation for this was suggested by Halton Arp in his time. He believed that matter starts off relatively light and becomes heavier over time. The mechanism alluded to by him, and made explicit in my book is what he called mass condensation:

Protons have become larger over time through the absorption of high energy photons. This has affected both gravity and inertia. Hence, the abstraction that we call mass has increased.

Protons increasing in size due to mass condensation

When discussing the fossil records, we tend to get stuck talking about size and gravity. We also tend to focus on the gravity of our planet. However, gravity has two parts to it. One is the planet, and the other is the objects attracted by the planet. If the material of both have increased in mass over time, it's easier to see how the increase could have been as dramatic as it appears to have been.

Based on Newton's universal law of gravity, a doubling in size of the proton will quadruple the gravitational attraction while only doubling inertia. There is probably more going on when it comes to gravity, but mass condensation goes a long way in explaining both the super-sized insects that existed on Earth some 300 million years ago and the enormous size of the dinosaurs that appeared some 200 million years later.

Wishful Thinking

My father has of late been quick to point out how warm winters have become in Norway, and I've assumed that this has been due to the fact that I don't believe in man made global warming. I believe in climate cycles driven by the sun. I also believe that we've seen the warmest of the current cycle, and that we're heading into a little ice age similar to what we saw some 400 years ago. To think such thoughts are of course tantamount to insanity these days, so I've simply assumed that my father's main concern has been for my mental health. However, there may have been some more immediate problem on his mind which has nothing to do with me.

My mother is from England, and she hates Norwegian winters. The ice that builds up on sidewalks during January and February makes it dangerous for anyone older than sixty to go out without spiked soles. The darkness and cold is also a pet hate, but my parents' house is big and well heated. They aren't exactly uncomfortable at home, so it's first and foremost the ice that my mother has a problem with.

The thing about the ice is that it wouldn't build up on sidewalks if winters were a few degrees warmer. My mother's problem with Norway would disappear if we had some global warming, and this may have been my father's main message in conversations that I've had with him lately. He's talking to me about how warm winters in Norway have become with the intent to hammer in some optimism about future winters for my mother.

This thought struck me the other day, because my mother has finally had enough. She's going to move out of Norway for ten weeks or so every winter, starting January 2024. The only thing that hasn't been decided on is where she'll go. The climate may be getting warmer, but this isn't happening fast enough for my mother who intends to spare herself the most nasty part of Norwegian winters by spending winters in England or some other ice free place during winters from here on out.

My father will of course join my mother in her annual flight from ice covered sidewalks. His attempts to keep her from doing so have finally failed. It will be interesting to see if this changes my father's tone when it comes to his concern about my conviction about the climate. If he's suddenly fine with the notion that winters may in fact be getting colder, and that this has been going on since the nineties, it will be clear that my father's concern wasn't about my position on the subject but my mother's increasing impatience with Norwegian winters.

Sidearm of the Jostedal glacier

By G.Lanting - Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link

Making Deals with the Devil

Here's an article on an interesting development in Brazil. Welfare recipients may soon have to prove that they, and their children, are fully up to day with their Covid vaccination schedule in order to receive their hand-outs. On a similar note, Covid vaccines are now part of the regular vaccine schedule for kids and adults in the US, which means that public schools will be able to refuse unvaccinated children access to their services.

The pressure is on to get everyone fully up to date on their boosters. Especially the poor are being targeted. Without the resources to get around the restrictions, they have no choice but to comply. However, the better off will soon be targeted as well. Any kind of state pension will eventually demand some kind of compliance with health guidelines. Following this, private pensions will be required by law to do the same.

The point of this can't possibly be a concern with people's health because there's no evidence to suggest that any of the mandates foisted on us over the past years have had anything but negative effects. The point must therefore be compliance and cost reduction. People forfeiting government services represent cost reduction for the government, and people willing to submit to possible harm are preferred to those who don't.

The fact that recent health mandates have proven themselves harmful rather than beneficial can in this perspective be seen as a bonus. Those who submit to the mandates end up living shorter lives, and are therefore less of a drain on the system. Not only do the politicians get their much desired kick from a display of subservience among their subjects, they get the financial benefit of lower costs as well. It's a win-win situation.

Offering to Molech

By Charles Foster - Illustrators of the 1897 Bible Pictures and What They Teach Us http://associate.com/photos/Bible-Pictures--1897-W-A-Foster/page-0074-1.jpg, Public Domain, Link

Censors Under Fire

There's a congressional hearing going on in the US. The stated aim of it is to discover the extent to which censorship has been used to suppress opinions on topics ranging from Hunter Biden's lap top to gender reassignment therapy for children and vaccine policies. However, the primary objective is no doubt to shield politicians from any blame when it comes to the various backlashes that are about to unfold.

I predicted back in 2021 that this would happen. Politicians will turn on the censors to deflect blame from their own complicity in the damage that they have wrought. My advice to the censors was to get out of dodge, and this too has happened. The rats were leaving the ship back in mid 2022. There's been a vaccine pivot. Opinion makers have changed colours on all sorts of subjects, leaving the abandoned herd to fend for itself.

My prediction for the current hearing is that nothing will come of it in terms of direct punishment. No-one will go to jail. However, justice will nevertheless be served. Censors are known to live short and miserable lives, and there's no reason to believe that this pattern won't repeat. In fact, justice may be served with a vengeance this time around because most censors have taken the remedies that they spent their days defending.

The people most likely to be up to date on their vaccine program are censors. They are fully boosted, and there's moral pressure for them to continue taking the boosters simply to prove to everyone that their belief in the health benefit of the mystery serum is genuine. They're facing Céline Gounder's dilemma. They know by now that the vaccine is dangerous, but to admit this is to commit social and economic suicide, so they continue taking the boosters in the hope that it will somehow not affect them negatively despite all the evidence to the contrary.

As the saying goes Karma is a bitch.

Karma

By John F. Knott - Knott, John F. (1918) War Cartoons, Dallas, Public Domain, Link

Anarchy and Chaos

One good thing that came out of the pandemic was a general awakening to the fact that governments have a tendency to come up with arbitrary rules and laws, based on nothing but gut feels and irrational calls from scared individuals. It doesn't matter if something is stupid. What matters to government is that whatever they do is popular in the moment when it is proposed. When popularity vanes a rule can always be revoked or forgotten, and things can go on as if nothing bad ever happened.

Here in Porto, my family and I were at one point apprehended by the police for going to the beach for some fresh air. It was a very serious offence and no laughing matter, according to the thug that lectured us on good citizenry. We were also forbidden from sitting down inside for a bite to eat. That was strictly for the vaccinated. Our local supermarket announced to its clients that it would soon be open only to the vaccinated. Without a valid health passport, no food could be bought at the place.

Then, suddenly all was forgotten. Something was happening in the east of Ukraine, and that distraction was all it took to drop the whole vaccine passport thing. A year later, it's as if it never happened. However, many people will never forget what happened. Especially young kids who've been left bewildered and in need of some answers.

Luckily for my son, he has a father with answers to why all of this happened, so he doesn't have to wonder how things can get so completely out of hand. He also knows what the solution to this would be, and he knows how to behave in a world where the solution is not yet implemented.

Arbitrary government edicts were at the root of all the crazy things that were going on. There was nothing scientific about any of it. It was pure tyranny. The solution we used to protect ourselves was simply to resist as much as possible, and my son has seen that this approach worked. None of us went along with the medical experiment that they pushed on people. This led to some inconveniences for a few weeks, but the reward is now clear. We don't have to worry about long term side-effects.

The real solution to the kind of craziness that government tends to hoist on its subjects from time to time is to get rid of it. We don't need government to make decisions for us. We can take care of this ourselves. Everything that the government does can either be stopped altogether or done through voluntary arrangements instead. Anarchy is the logical alternative to government, and there's no reason to believe that it wouldn't work. In fact, government needs some level of magic thinking in order to defend its existence. We have to believe in fairy tales about some social contract that magically subject us to the whims of madmen in government.

Anarchy requires no such magic thinking. It's based on natural laws that anyone can relate to. If something happens in my house, I'm the one to resolve the issue. If something happens between two domains, it's either resolved through voluntary arbitration or not resolved at all. It's never the job of a third party to force itself upon us. We don't have to bake a cake if we don't want to.

Anarchy worked well for the Irish up until the English invasion in the 1600s. Ireland was a well functioning and peaceful society. The same can be said for Iceland until the Danes took over in the 1200s. These places are still well functioning, but that doesn't take away from the fact that they functioned well without government, and that government added nothing that wasn't already there.

Somalia, which is often held up as a nightmare due to anarchy was in fact a well functioning society up until it became colonized. It was government that turned Somalia into a hell hole. The chaos that ensued was due to the failures of government, and the continued chaos in that area is due to the persistent insistence by the UN to install a government in the region at any cost. The last thing they want to see is a prosperous anarchy returning on the world stage. But Somalia is in fact doing better than its neighbours in terms of economic growth despite the UN's efforts to destroy its free market economy.

A quick look in any history book reveals that every major disaster has been due to government whims and edicts. Wars, mass starvation, genocide, persecutions, economic stagnation. The list is long. Nothing even close to this kind of chaos has been caused by anarchy, and the history of  pre-government Ireland, Somalia and other historic anarchies proves that such places don't do any of the horrible things that government is known to do at a regular basis.

Yet, the word anarchy is commonly used as a synonym for chaos, and this causes some confusion, especially among those who know that it's precisely the other way around.

It's weird to see reporters calling violent anti-government protesters anarchists, because the anti-government protesters aren't in fact anti-government. They're only anti-current-government. What they want is a different government, more to their liking. Anarchists don't want a government at all, and they don't show up at protests for the simple reason that they don't think the government has any legitimacy.

Anarchists don't protest loudly in the streets. Anarchist creates instead anarchies of their own. These are little enclaves of independence, usually confined to a home and associated properties. Investment decisions are based on the pragmatics of the situation. Government is at best seen as an unreliable source of subsidies, and even then it's viewed as an enemy.

My eleven year old son understands all of this. I haven't lectured him. I've only pointed out the absurdity of having overlords ruling over us. Especially when these overlords are as dense as wood blocks and with no moral fibre.

This has in turn emboldened my son to point out this fact to some of his friends, and the response has been positive. Given the choice between a system where overlords rule over us and a system where we simply get together and resolve issues as we go along, kids prefer the idea that they themselves are in charge of their destiny.

The social contract

Problems and Solutions

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”

― Soren Kierkegaard

I was at a dinner party held by my uncle in Norway back in the 1990s, shortly after Al Gore had won the Nobel Piece Price for scaring the world with his prediction that sea revels were about to rise by tens of meters if we didn't immediately cut back on CO2 emissions. The lady next to me was from Holland, and could tell me that she was happy to have moved to Norway because Holland was about to get hit by massive floods that would render the area unliveable within a decade or two. She had bought a house high up from the sea to be on the safe side.

When I told her that nothing dramatic was going to happen, and that Holland would be just fine, she looked at me as if I was some extremist nut case. How could I possibly say such a stupid and ignorant thing?

I've since come across the same shocked stares every time I tell people to calm down about the climate. I'm the unscientific nut job, despite having been right for some 30 years. Disaster is always just around the corner, and I'm the crazy one for not believing it to be true.

Some people feel genuinely sorry for my mental inability to acknowledge the facts. My father will always tell me how warm the weather in Norway is compared to when he was little. Winter in Norway hasn't been very cold this year, and he's been quick to point this out.

All of this is a little irritating because I've taken the time to read up on the science behind the climate scare, and it doesn't actually predict anything dramatic at all. Some models even predict ice to build up on places like the Antarctic and Greenland, and since this is exactly what's going on at the moment, the CO2 school of global warming is quick to highlight the fact that some of their colleagues made this prediction.

I made this prediction too back in 2017. I used the exact same logic as what is currently being rolled out. But that didn't help. I'm still a little crazy for not believing that the world will soon become unliveable if we don't do something dramatic to save ourselves.

It amazes me that people keep falling for this hysteria some 30 years after it was initially created. But it fits a recurring pattern when it comes to political fads, so the longevity of it isn't a complete mystery. Seen from a political and historic viewpoint, this is exactly how things progress. A fad, once established and made popular, will hang around for about 70 years before it's finally washed away. The reason for this has to do with fashion rather than intelligence or insight.

The idea that CO2 is killing us is popular, and it's therefore going to be around for about 40 more years. This is based on the observation from history that links ideas to generations. An idea will evolve through the three stages of maturity as if it was a person. It starts off as the fresh new thing that blows away the old and established. It becomes in turn the mature and established idea, which subsequently fades into old age until some new fashionable idea blows away the old one.

The CO2 school of global warming is by now firmly positioned as the establishment idea, and this school is therefore in a position to push solutions onto everybody. It doesn't matter that the problem doesn't exist. Sea levels aren't rising. Nobody's dying due to climate change. What matters is that the idea of imminent doom is popular, and there's therefore a demand for solutions.

This means that we are now being advised in our economic planning by people who have proven themselves wrong for 30 years. These people have been given extraordinary power over national policies of great consequence for the general public.

Their solution to their made up problem is to build wind turbines in huge numbers, and this is being done in places like Norway at a massive scale. There are also a great number of these turbines planned for offshore deployment. The environmental destruction this will bring is easy to calculate, so it's not like they're ignorant of what they're doing. But none of this matters, because we're not dealing with facts, we're dealing with a popular sentiment.

Unsustainable sustainability 

By © Hans Hillewaert, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

History of the Pandemic

We've entered the second year of what we can term the post-pandemic period, and thanks to Wikipedia and their page on notable deaths, there's no lack of data for us to analyse. Their data is admittedly skewed towards the affluent and well to do. However, this doesn't invalidate the fact that changes in people's general heath will show up in these numbers.

Having looked at other people's work, based on numbers from other sources, I see no significant difference between what I've found in Wikipedia's data and what others have found in other datasets.

What separates my calculations from other people's work is the weight I assign to numbers according to age. I use a simple weighing algorithm that multiplies deaths among people younger than 70 by four and divide deaths among those older than 69 years of age by ten.

I do this in order to filter out noise. Old people die in waves that come and go, and there's nothing unnatural or tragic about this, so I weigh such deaths lightly. However, deaths among people younger than 70 years of age are unusual and often tragic. Such deaths remove many years of life that could have been, and they deserve for this reason to be taken more seriously.

But this weighing has had little impact on my final numbers because the percentage of young people dying hovers around 19% to 24%. Very few data points stand out as unusual. The only notable outlier was April 2020 when the percentage dropped to 17. May and June of 2021 were also unusual with their percentage as high as 26.

Relative mortality rate of the young from 2018 until today

The relative mortality rate among the young was 22% at the start of the period and is now 23%. This means that there's been a small drop in life expectancy. However, there's nothing alarming in this. If we remain at around 23% into the future, no-one will notice that there's been a change.

With this in mind, we can take a closer look at the deaths that occurred during 2020 (yellow) and 2021 (green), relative to the two preceding years (blue and red):

Notable deaths 2018, 19, 20 and 21

First thing to note is that the pre-pandemic years of 2018 and 2019 saw deaths hover steadily between 500 and 700.

Next thing to note is that the pandemic didn't have much of an impact before March 2020.

April 2020 doesn't show up as much different from the rest of the pandemic, but total deaths of that month was actually quite high. The raw data shows 1140 deaths, but the low mortality rate among young people during that same month pulls my severity adjusted number down to 900. We were dealing with a severe wave of deaths among old people, which is sad but not tragic.

Starting November 2020, we see deaths rise sharply until January 2021. A number of vaccines were rolled out at that time, and some of them were so harmful that they had to be withdrawn. However, deaths remained elevated through the entire year of 2021. The vaccines didn't result in a drop in deaths as was initially promised, and we are still stuck with excess deaths, as can be seen in the chart below.

2022 compared to pre-pandemic and pandemic years

The blue columns are the average of 2018 and 2019. The red columns are the average of 2020 and 2021, and the yellow columns are numbers for 2022. All numbers are severity adjusted.

The pandemic years are the worst years on average, as expected. However, 2022 should have seen negative excess deaths. With a lot of old and frail people swept away by the pandemic, the population should have been healthier than what it was prior to the pandemic, and we should have seen fewer deaths as a consequence. But the population isn't healthier than before the pandemic. We're stuck in between pandemic and pre-pandemic levels.

This is not how things normally evolve, and the situation is concerning. Not least because the number for January 2023 has come in at 900, which is worse than all previous Januaries, with the exception of January 2021.

Casimir Effect as Polarization

The Casimir effect is a phenomenon in which two neutral surfaces attract or repel each other when in extremely close contact. The effect has been used as evidence for the existence of a zero-point field because the magnitude of the attracting force can be calculated from quantum field formulas. However, there are other ways to calculate this force that doesn't require quantum mechanics.

This YouTube video, pointed out to me by "Escaped Serf" on Facebook, explains how the Casimir effect may be nothing more complicated than polarization of dipoles.

Polarization in this context means rearrangement of charge, which occurs naturally wherever dipoles are free to move in response to nearby charges. Polarization explains why charged surfaces always attract neutral surfaces.

Charged surfaces attracting neutral surfaces

Polarization is the mechanism behind the phenomenon of capacitance. It allows charge surfaces separated by a dielectric to store electric energy. This may in turn explain why gravity is unevenly distributed across the planet.

Uncharged and charged capacitor

Polarization also explains why dipoles align into structures where positive ends hook up to negative ends. This is how chemical bindings are produced, and the phenomenon of sticky light can also be understood in terms of dipoles.

Dipoles hooking up to make a simple structure

Dipoles exist everywhere because atoms are dipoles. There are also good reasons to suspect that photons are dipoles.

The dielectric photon

This in turn explains the phenomenon of electron-positron pair production.

Electron-positron pair production from photon

It also explains the Faraday effect in which light is polarized by magnetism.

Photons polarized by a magnet

With so many phenomena either clearly or probably due to polarization of dipoles and dielectrics, it's no surprise that Hendrik Casimir's first thought was to explain his short range attracting force in these terms.

Casimir initially believed that the force he had discovered was related to Van der Waals force. However, he found the solution unsatisfactory. The calculated force didn't exactly match what he was measuring, and the calculations were complicated. Casimir was therefore delighted to find a simpler way to calculate his force by using equations found in quantum field theory.

However, the Casimir effect will sometimes produce a repelling force, and this has to be quietly ignored for the quantum field theory explanation to hold. Van der Waals force, on the other hand, is sometimes attracting and sometimes repelling for reasons that are easily explained in terms of our current understanding of the atom.

Atomic nucleus surrounded by ten electron clouds = Neon

The electron clouds surrounding atomic nuclei repel electron clouds of other atoms in such a way that only very close contact can lead to attraction. If such close contact isn't achieved, or cannot be achieved, there will be no attraction.

All of this can be explained by Van der Waals force. But there may nevertheless be something additional going on. If we allow for an aether of zero-point particles, as suggested in my physics, we can propose situations where these particles get stuck between surfaces, thus preventing Van der Waals force to fully kick in.

Zero-point particles surrounding an electron

This would lead to real world measurements that deviate somewhat from those predicted by Van der Waals force alone, which is exactly what Hendrik Casimir discovered and frustrated him into looking for alternative explanations.